Sales figures - Where?

[oscar19681]

A thread about sales figures? Man i feel like i,m watching wall street reports here!

[Sonarman]

At least it gets our minds off the dreaded DRM topic for a while!

[Hitman]

However, even if the 1.5 milion sales figure for sh1 to 4 since 1996 is true, it is still only a blip on Ubisoft's balance sheet. Assassin's Creed 2 alone has sold 6,000,000 copies since november and Ubisoft is predicting total sales of Euros 860,000,000 (i.e. about U.S. $1.2 billion) this year.

Yeah, I see how rightfully they are bothered about some people pirating their new SH5 ... would ruin them to care about the loyal customers of their niche market, would it?

[tater]

According to their annual reports, total sales have ~45% US, 49% Europe, and 6% the rest of the world.

Even doubled, those numbers are quite low. Low enough, in fact, that instead of us being beholden to them ("oh, please, oh please, sell use broken products that WE will finish for you—oh, and add ), invasive DRM schemes!"—they should be beholden to us.

[onelifecrisis]

Originally Posted by tater

According to their annual reports, total sales have ~45% US, 49% Europe, and 6% the rest of the world.

Even doubled, those numbers are quite low. Low enough, in fact, that instead of us being beholden to them ("oh, please, oh please, sell use broken products that WE will finish for you—oh, and add ), invasive DRM schemes!"—they should be beholden to us.

Er... those numbers are percentages. They aren't high or low. They add up to 100.

[FIREWALL]

Concerning SH3. I can account for 3 discs.

[Bilge_Rat]

I took a quick gander at the Ubi financial statements for 2008-09:

Highlights:

- sales: E 1,057 million
- funds re-invested
in game development: E 209 million
- sales from products developped in-house: 81% (60 out of 112)
- PC game sales: 9% of total sales (i.e. 81% from consoles)
-number of employees : 5,765 (83% or 4,790 in production)
-average age of employees: 31.2 years.

http://www.ubisoftgroup.com/index.php?p=195&art_id=

- Ubisoft's profits have gone down from E 110 million in 08 to E 68 million in 09 and they are forecasting a loss of (E 50 million) for 2010.

They have more important things to worry about than a boycott of SH5 by a few hundred consumers.

[Navarre]

Ubisoft sells their games to wholesalers, the wholesalers sell these games to retailers and retailers to the customers (players).

For every Ubissoft game you see in the shops, Ubisoft got the money already from the wholesalers. They don't get our money we pay if we don't order directly at the Ubisoft shop.

So in first place, Ubisoft has only the number of sales to the wholesaler.
They don't know how well a game eventually sold, they only recognized that it is bad in sales if there is low or no re-orders from the wholesaler.

To get the true sales numbers in realtime(24h/7d) , they must pay for an expensive account at MediaControl (http://www.media-control.de/startseite.html). MediaControl collects the real sales numbers of games from the retailer and create analysis and charts of these data.

But now with these new online DRM, Ubisoft don't need anymore this expensive MediaControl account. They can now see how much bought their games, because a customer who bought a Ubisoft game is online and connected with their own servers.

[Onkel Neal]

Originally Posted by Bilge_Rat

For SH1, I had read a long time ago, I believe in a Ubisoft press release announcing SH2, that SH1 had sold 300,000 units. Of course, that was a different time when the Sim market was stronger and there was no competition from consoles.

On SH3, mr. Stevens may have forgotten his little sit-down with the SH4 Dev Team:

Subsim: Back in June 2005 CNN quoted the NPD Group’s April sales numbers at 26,600 units. Is that accurate? What does Ubisoft claim for sales numbers for SH3 to date?
SH4 Dev Team: The best thing about a simulation title is that the amount of sales tends to remain constant each month. SHIII sells well even one year after its release. We estimate Silent Hunter 3 sold over 300,000 copies worldwide.

See the part where I said sources "inside Ubisoft (not the devs)"?

[Bilge_Rat]

Originally Posted by Neal Stevens

See the part where I said sources "inside Ubisoft (not the devs)"?

oh, so it's even more of a niche product than I thought with around 90,000 sales for SH3.

[Onkel Neal]

Like I said, I cannot say with 100% accuracy, but I have seen them verified by different sources. Check on the web for niche game sales, for stuff like strategy games, etc. They don't sell many copies. That's why there are no more Nuke Subsims. EA said hell no, and when Sonalysts tried to go it on their own with Dangerous Waters, it did not sell well.

But, hey, no worries, I'm sure some indie developer is working on a nuke subsim as we speak. Any day now. Soon!

[Heretic]

That's why it's so crazy to expect some other developer to make a decent sub sim. They'd have the same budget and time restraints. They'd still have to market it to the casual gamer. But they start from scratch! Do they have the budget to have both hardcore and mass appeal elements? No. And which of those will get cut? The hardcore stuff, since it's not vital to the mass market you have to reach. The Silent Hunter franchise is built on a first rate sim. They can put all the mass market goodies they want to on top of it as long as the guts are still there and still accessable.

[tater]

Originally Posted by onelifecrisis

Er... those numbers are percentages. They aren't high or low. They add up to 100.

Neal's numbers were real numbers. SOmone suggested that might just ne US sales.

So take the 90k sales figure, assume it is just the US, and call it 200k, it's still not huge global sales.

[Onkel Neal]

Correct, they are US numbers, sorry. I have amended the post.

[tater]

How many unique visitors does SS get? Seems to me SS catches the eye of a LARGE % of total SH sales. MOst forums only reach a tiny fraction of gamers per title...

SS is an amazing resource for people wanting to make sub games.